THIS WEEK
The Lead Story Half-year review
Selling prices soar to propel TCM to record first-half value, despite volume declines
Nielsen data shows that the UK book market posted its most valuable first half of the year on record, yet the top-line gains disguise a steep drop in volume sales as increased prices prop up the market
Tom Tivnan @tomtivnan
P
owered by a strong fiction market and a memoir from a prince of the realm, 2023 was the best-ever first half of
The record 2023 TCM haul has been achieved by Britons paying 46p more per book than last year. Average selling price is at its highest-ever mark in the first half-year
a year since accurate records began, with £776.6m shiſted through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market in the initial 26 weeks of this year. That represents a 1.1% bump on this point in 2022, with the market surging 11.5% (or £81m) from where it was in the first half of the last pre-pandemic year. That was the good news. The, if not bad, then somewhat disconcerting news: much of this growth is inflation-related. At 87.5 million units, there were 3.8 million fewer print books sold in the first six months of this year than in 2022, a drop of 4.2%. The record 2023 TCM value haul has been achieved by Britons paying 46p more per book than last year. Average selling price is at its highest-ever mark (£8.87) in the first half-year, while discounting—with recommended retail prices reduced by around 23%, on average—is at its slim- mest point in 19 years. Rising prices and shallower discounts are not new to followers of The Bookseller’s charts coverage over the past decade: a.s.p. has been climbing almost unabated since 2013. There is much nuance around pricing this year—hard- backs, for example, have had a good 2023 with 20.7 million units sold; a greater share of hardback sales obviously means overall a.s.p. will rise. But it is interest- ing how the market has changed. Prior to the pandemic, the previ-
ous six-month high-water mark was 2008’s £748.2m. That was achieved on 103.5 million units sold, a whopping 16 million more books than have been shiſted in 2023. Fiction has been a standout in the recent
BONNIE GARMUS HAD THE BESTSELLING ADULT FICTION TITLE IN THE FIRST SIX MONTHS OF THE YEAR
06 21st July 2023
BookTok era, and that remains the case in 2023, earning £215.8m through the TCM, the category’s best return in 15 years. As she did for all of 2022, Colleen Hoover is Fiction’s bestseller, chalking £6.2m with five books in the overall Top 50. But are we seeing the first retreat from peak BookTok? This year there are 18 titles in the Fiction top 100—which have collectively shiſted £8.6m—that I would judge are mainly TikTok phenomena; last year it was 24 titles, which earned £10.1m. Adult Non-Fiction: Trade was up 2.5% to
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